Metaphor and Gesture

This volume is the first to offer an overview on metaphor and gesture — a new multi-disciplinary area of research. Scholars of metaphor have been paying increasing attention to spontaneous gestures with speech; meanwhile, researchers in gesture studies have been focussing on the abstract ideas which receive physical representation through metaphors when speakers gesture. This book presents a snapshot of the state of the art in these converging fields, offering research papers as well as commentaries from multiple perspectives. In addition to conceptual metaphor theory it includes different theoretical approaches to semiotics, and the methods used range from controlled experimentation, to cognitive ethnography, to lexical semantic analysis. The use of metaphor in gesture is shown to reflect idiosyncracies of thought in the moment of speaking as well as structural, cultural, and interactional patterns. The series of commentaries discusses the potential importance of studying metaphor and gesture from the perspectives of such fields as anthropology, cognitive linguistics, conversation analysis, psychology, and semiotics.

Table of contents

Contributors

vii–viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

Alan Cienki and Cornelia Müller

1–4

Why study metaphor and gesture?

Alan Cienki

5–25

From left to right...: Coverbal gestures and their symbolic use of space

Geneviève Calbris

27–53

Gesture as a conceptual mapping tool

Robert F. Williams

55–92

A fresh look at the foundations of mathematics: Gesture and the psychological reality of conceptual metaphor